The use of application to access and process sensitive data presents challenges for application developers and owner/managers of such sensitive data to ensure that these applications are not leaking this sensitive data from one application to another. This problem has been referred to the transitive data problem.
In conventional computing devices, when an application A shares sensitive data D with an application B, the data D may be leaked by application B to application C or other applications. The data may also be modified before being leaked to the one or more other applications. Such interaction and transitivity issues can exist in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs), such as the extensible ecosystems developed in JavaEE and .NET and the Android operating system, as well as other such environments in which data may be disseminated between applications in undesirable and unpredictable ways. Examples of situations where these issues may arise include: (1) organizations which utilize Bring Your Own Device plans in which employees can user their personal mobile device (phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) to access sensitive company information, (2) financial services where sensitive financial data could be passed from one application to another, (3) health monitoring services—where sensitive health-related data that may be protected under federal and/or state law (e.g. HIPAA) could be passed from one application to another. Reliable auditing of trust-critical events is an emerging requirement.